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abstractbillon Show HN: Experiments in AI-generation of crosswords

Oh that's really interesting thanks! That would actually be an easy constraint to add too.

abstractbillon Show HN: I made a multiplayer crossword game

Thanks for the kind words, I will try to get something written up about it.

abstractbillon Show HN: I made a multiplayer crossword game

I didn't notice HN had replaced the link (https://crosswordracing.com) by the current (at the time) redirect. If you want to go to the current front-page game, you should visit https://crosswordracing.com

Edit: If anyone has any interest in how I'm generating the crosswords feel free to reach out. It was a fascinating problem to solve, and I'm not aware of any better automatically-generated crosswords than these right now.

abstractbillon Doctor Who theme: Ron Grainer (composer) Delia Derbyshire (musician, arranger)

Same, I was a huge Orbital fan back in the day but found their version of the theme lazy and boring.

In contrast, around the same time they put it out, Plaid put out a track named Unbank that I'm convinced was inspired by the Doctor Who theme and is imo rather fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc39YRO8HM4

abstractbillon Terence Tao on O1

My experience with O1 has been very different. I wouldn't even say it's performing at a "good undergrad" level for me.

For example, I asked a pretty simple question here and it got completely confused:

https://moorier.com/math-chat-1.png https://moorier.com/math-chat-2.png https://moorier.com/math-chat-3.png

(Full chat should be here: https://chatgpt.com/share/66e5d2dd-0b08-8011-89c8-f6895f3217...)

abstractbillon You're Not Smiling Enough

"Online identity is hard."

I suppose I'm probably in a tiny minority here, but I think I'd be pretty happy to see online identity get harder (which I think is what will happen, with better and cheaper spoofing).

There are a very few entities I actually want to be able to verify my identity. For everyone else I'd much prefer to go back to the default-anonymous internet of the late-90s.

abstractbillon Euclid's Proof that √2 is Irrational

These days I much prefer a different proof of this fact, attributed to Conway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNOtOPjaLZs -- I'm actually about half-way through teaching it to my kids right now!

abstractbillon Show HN: Rotary Phone Project

Nice project! Our house has something similar. Every room has its own rotary phone, with its own number (usually someone's birthday!). I think we have 7 or 8 total. They can't dial out or anything fancy like that, but they can all call each other. The kids mostly use it to call and ask us to bring snacks when they're playing, and we mostly use it to call them and ask them to come to dinner!

abstractbillon Using ChatGPT to read my daughter's handwriting and critique her math

I'm truly amazed that we've come this far so quickly. Even I sometimes struggle to read my daughter's handwriting! The critique seems to show a good understanding of what's happening too (I'm generally really wary of the Eliza Effect, but this seems "real" to me).

abstractbillon Defecting from North Korea is now harder

If you want to try to help, Liberty In North Korea is a charity I donate to: https://libertyinnorthkorea.org/

abstractbillon The LLama Effect: Leak Sparked a Series of Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT

The models are a lot of fun to play with, but yeah, every time I've tried to use them for something "serious" they nearly always invent stuff (and are so convincing in how they write about it!).

Most recently I've been interested in what's happened with the 4-color theorem since the 1976 computer-assisted proof, and decided to use GPTChat instead of google+wikipedia. GPTChat had me convinced and excited that, apparently the computer-assisted part of the proof has been getting steadily smaller and smaller over the years and decades, and we're getting close to a proof that might not need computer assistance at all. It wrote really convincingly about it! And then I went and looked for the papers it had talked about. They didn't exist, and their authors either didn't exist, or worked in completely unrelated fields.

abstractbillon Ask HN: Concise, pragmatic baby manual for first-time dad?

Parenting is, in my experience, quite a bit like taking care of a drunk person who very slowly sobers up over several years.

The internet is generally a terrible place to get parenting advice/support/etc from. For some reason it's a topic that brings out the most judgemental in people.

Parents of one child are often the worst to talk to. They have figured out what works for their one kid, and are quite unaware that it doesn't generalize at all.

Mothers will (usually) feel instant love for their new baby. Fathers will often not, and it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking there must be something wrong with you for that. There isn't, it's all just hormones. Wait, and those feelings will come over time.

I think that's all I've got. Good luck!

abstractbillon Mercedes-Benz to introduce acceleration subscription fee

We recently shopped for new home appliances and were surprised at how hard it is to find non-"smart" ones these days.

At this point I think it's inevitable that some appliance features will require a subscription (e.g. your fridge's ice-maker is an additional $5/month).

abstractbillon Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

As the video points out (toward the end), since these robots recognize and work on each individual plant, they are much more able to deal with more biodiversity than our current methods, which can only scale for monocrops.

abstractbillon New (LTE) Rotary Cell Phone [video]

Very nice.

Our home has a rotary phone in most of the rooms (they're cheap on ebay and easy to repair if they're not working). Each one is plugged into a Grandstream HT802, which gets it onto our home network. A raspberry pi runs FusionPBX, which gives each phone a number, and lets them all dial each other. The kids love it!

abstractbillon I’m a productive programmer with a memory of a fruit fly

Oh wow! No, sadly I don't remember that, nor much else from that long ago. That's funny (assuming I wasn't a dick about mocking you!)

I actually completely agree with your ordering of least-useful to most-useful comments. I still tend to view these most-useful comments as just kind of interesting historical tidbits, rather than something that really helps me do my job, but at least we agree on the order :)

abstractbillon I’m a productive programmer with a memory of a fruit fly

This is funny to me because we seem to be complete opposites! I have a great short-term memory, but my long-term memory is sadly completely trashed. I don't care if someone wants to document their code, but I never actually trust that documentation to be accurate or up-to-date. I expect it to be misleading and time-wasting, and so I only trust the code itself. I personally only write comments for bits of code that I find confusing, and I think it's a bit of a failing when I have to do that -- I'd much prefer to put in the extra time and effort to rewrite the code to not be confusing.

(I don't write code for a living these days btw, only for myself. It's much more fun, and I get to not care anymore whether other people think I'm wrong about things like these).

abstractbillon What will you do with the stories entrusted to you?

When someone dares to step forward and speak up, listen. Just be. It's one of the most powerful things you can do. Hijacking conversation doesn't create connection, it breaks it.

I might be in a minority here but I feel a huge sense of relief when someone shares an anecdote that tells me they understand what I'm going through, because they've been through similar things themself.

(I'm probably oversharing, but one of my daughters has some rather severe developmental difficulties and has threatened to kill me, my wife, and our other daughter more times than I can remember. It is oddly comforting to hear other peoples' stories and know I'm not alone).

abstractbillon The Ugly War over Bob Ross’ Ghost (2021)

Thanks!

abstractbillon The Ugly War over Bob Ross’ Ghost (2021)

No, I didn't know about that until today, but I'll definitely be watching it as soon as I can.

abstractbillon The Ugly War over Bob Ross’ Ghost (2021)

The Twitch marathon was my idea, and I did pretty much all of the work to make it happen, including negotiating the rights with both Janson and Bob Ross Inc (not just the rights to the content, but also permission to use Bob's likeness and name in our marketing).

I never got the impression there was anything potentially shady going on, so this was a very sad read for me personally.

Especially annoying: When the marathon was really taking off and the episodes with Steve were shown, viewers really wanted to know what had happened to him, and so did we (we weren't immune to having emotional reactions to the marathon ourselves). We tried really hard to find Steve, both on our own and by sending many emails to both Janson and Bob Ross Inc asking about him. In the end the conversation was shut down by a curt and cryptic response from Bob Ross Inc -- something like "The whereabouts of Steve are best left a mystery".

abstractbillon Should I Use a Carousel?

Carousels aren't for users. They are for partners -- people who partner with you will do things in exchange for a spot on the carousel.

abstractbillon Ask HN: Do you create music? let's hear it

I try! Lots of different styles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqPWtWMZHCI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iapl6xIILSI

https://soundcloud.com/abstractbill/spaced

https://soundcloud.com/abstractbill/beow

abstractbillon How to Think for Yourself

"It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have. But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more."

This is the exact opposite of my experience. My independent-mindedness happens the most as a reaction to being surrounded by too much groupthink. On the other hand, when I'm surrounded by people who are already having plenty of crazy ideas, they begin to feel a bit tiresome to me, and I don't feel the need to have any of my own.

abstractbillon Public Domain Movies

Is there an easy way to donate money toward this work? I would do that in a heartbeat.

abstractbillon Systemisers are better at maths

I don't think that's true. Certainly among the people in my department while I was doing my PhD in mathematics, it was universally agreed that mathematics is not a science (because mathematicians don't do experiments as a part of their work).

Even outside of math departments I see some evidence of that agreement -- for example, why else would the "STEM" acronym list Science and Math separately?

abstractbillon Launch HN: JITX (YC S18) – Automating Circuit Board Design

Really incredible -- you've made something I didn't know I needed, until watching the demo videos just now. Can't wait to throw away the breadboard :)

Congrats on the launch!

abstractbillon Ask HN: What “dumbphones” are available and viable in the US?

I'm thinking about downgrading to a Blackberry Classic. Not quite a dumb phone, but from what I've seen it's much more of a tool than an entertainment/social-media/time-wasting device, which is exactly what I'm looking for. There's no way I could do without navigation, so I don't think anything more dumb will work for me.

abstractbillon Ask HN: I think my company might be selling. What should I be doing to prepare?

There aren't very many concrete things you can do at this point. All I can come up with is:

- Find a good CPA if you don't already know one, just in case your equity turns out to be worth something

- Consider carefully whether you would stay (and for how long) if you were offered some kind of "golden handcuff" deal

- Start thinking about what you would like to do next

abstractbillon The Merge

"Until I made a real effort to combat it, I found myself getting extremely addicted to the internet."

This seems to imply sama is resisting the inevitable merge. Can't we instead try to steer it in a more positive direction? Where are the startups trying to keep you addicted to the internet in a way that improves your life? They don't seem to exist, because the incentives aren't right -- it's way more profitable to keep you hooked in ways that make your life worse. How do we fix those incentives?